Morphine Ritual
Spawn of Devout Parents Pondering
They keep the relief
in a locked box of what
can be stretched as if it
were candy, and further
melted; and opened only
by what is shaped as if
dough, and then scored
and welded for the tumblers
and pins that would prefer
to be sleeping. But my father’s
skin has yet to develop those
marvelous ridges that his
mother’s perfected, like time
inside a tree. Perhaps all trees
are female, recording history
in a nipple-like spiral, enduring
the suckling rage of her man-children;
becoming just part of the landscape
until they crack open, like catci
harboring scorpions, an urban
legend not to be believed.
Perhaps my father’s problem
was that his lungs were stuck
in a sepia delirium, the wrong
age, the wrong romanticism;
perhaps he could never quite
breathe. He breathed for hours
when they said we would know
in one; he floated for days when
they said it could take years;
but when his lips stopped moving
his chest was warm as a crucible,
a coke oven, as if to challenge
the morphine rigging so at last
he would know the sensation
of dying without tears.
Spawn of Devout Parents Pondering
Above the bunk bed, ink and paper
wainscoting, slow motion with cells
deleted: the newspaper account of
the Ali-Frazier fight, as if lovers
in wood, re-enacting their narrative.
The boy had begun to change, a hunk
of kid grease pulled through his blond
hair each morning, black sweater even
when it was hot. He had not yet graduated
to the blue pilot’s jacket, though it was
just a matter of semesters until his gray
eyes became indecent. How it must have been
for his parents, watching their children
become individuals: the eldest with a job
at the ice cream parlor, the girl my age
falling in love with animals; the empty
bunk, below, waiting for another brother
to fill it but the mother too delicate. How it was
to sleep with such images above, no sacred
natives or saviors crossing the Atlantic
but the sweat spiraling off temples for
both victor and defeated, as if branches
practicing at rain they would make for
tertiary plants; animation delayed by
the necessity of the art form, click of the lens,
moments when we forget to focus.
This must be how loss begins,
for the greatest of all time, and the lesser of us,
the lean and invisible attempting to count
as much as the squat and intractable problems
of the social contract.
Jane Rosenberg LaForge's poetry, fiction, critical and personal essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ottawa Arts Review, Boston Literary Magazine, THRUSH, Ne'er-Do-Well Literary Magazine, and The Western Journal of Black Studies. Her memoir-fantasy, An Unsuitable Princess, is available from Jaded Ibis Press. Her full-length collection of poetry, With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women was published in fall 2012 by The Aldrich Press. She is also the author of the chapbooks After Voices, published by Burning River of Cleveland in 2009, and Half-Life, from Big Table Publishing of Boston in 2010. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
